vocabulary profiling

When I read some books about literature like Oedipus the King etc., they are all in old English so I cannot understand the unknown words from content.  However, if it is a normal book or an article sometimes I understand the word's meaning from content.  Also, if there are any tips about unknown words like in the slides in which there was knife so we can predict stabbing.  In our course books sometimes there are matching activities before reading the text.  We try to predict the meaning of the words that are used in content.